New Year's and sacred mountains

So for New Year's we got our first three day weekend! We decided to visit the nearby Hengshan mountain, which is one of China's five sacred mountains. Our planned day trip turned out to be far more of an odyssey. I went with 4 of the other interns and I think we were all taken aback by the vast scale and beauty of the place. I was just expecting a little ol' mountain with a couple of ancient temples on it maybe, but this mountain was made up of several ranges with 72 peaks with maybe 100 or more ancient temples, shrines, pools and sites perched on mountainsides and embedded in thick forest. It was massive. When we arrived we found that the last bus home was 4pm so we realised we'd have to stay the night if we wanted to see anything at all. We heard that there was a hotel at the top of the highest peak (1,290m up) so we headed straight for there. We did a lot of walking, took a bus up a bit, then a cable car, then some more walking on ancient stone steps and finally got to the top in time to watch the sun set from a Shaolin temple perched on the peak. 

It was so cold by this point and I wasn't prepared for it - there were still patches of lingering snow towards the top. We found a couple of hotel rooms - 3 beds between 5 cos we didn't have much money with us - and found a little empty restaurant to eat in. After the meal we just sat in our shabby, unheated hotel room, huddled in blankets and drinking lots of beer to try and get a bit of an alcohol jacket. Jeez it was cold. We got maybe a few hours sleep and then at 6 headed to the nearby Sunrise Platform to watch the sunrise above distant mountain ranges. The skies were so clear at that height and watching the sun gradually come up was unbelievable. We spent that day slowly meandering down the mountain and trying to take in as many temples and other sites as we could. A lot of the sacred places were build of an amazing white stone and nestled in the forest they looked straight out of Lord of the Rings or something. Finally we got a rickety bus home and arrived back feeling tired, filthy but pretty good. Definitely a memorable New Year's...